


Unless I Try

by PrairieDawn



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: A little self indulgent, Also kinda meta, Bonding Over Comic Books, Catharsis, Comic Con, M/M, Real Person Cameos, Star Trek as Fiction, Wolverine as Fiction, past trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-26
Updated: 2019-01-26
Packaged: 2019-10-16 08:49:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17546474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrairieDawn/pseuds/PrairieDawn
Summary: Hawkeye and BJ accompany Radar O'Reilly's oldest girl to Comic Con and discover how nice it is to read with people you love.





	Unless I Try

**Author's Note:**

  * For [transwolverin3](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=transwolverin3).



> Comic Con did occur in San Diego in 1975 and Stan Lee was there. I did backdate the publication of the four Claremont Wolverine comics and turn them into a single volume for simplicity. But you know, MASH continuity.

San Diego Comic Con, Summer 1975

 

Hawkeye ought to have been embarrassed to be rifling through long, narrow cardboard boxes full of comic books while wearing green and yellow spandex, but given the company he’d almost have been more embarrassed to be seen in street clothes. A very nice looking younger man dressed as something rugged and vaguely medieval tapped him on the shoulder. “Have you read this yet? Brand new, Chris Claremont. The art is amazing and the storyline…not your usual. Really deep stuff.”

He took the comic, though he’d actually been surreptitiously scouting for porn for him and BJ to read with Peg, maybe something on The Premise as Radar’s daughter Anna so primly described it. “Wolverine,” he read. Hmm. Seemed related somehow to the X-Men comics Anna liked so much. He had cash to burn, so he carried the shiny, thick as a real book copy over to the dealer, paid the man, and tucked it into his bag. 

He should get over to the big conference room where the book signings were, see how BJ was getting on. It looked like he’d be there a good hour, waiting in Stan Lee’s line with that copy of Spiderman something or other for Radar’s Christmas gift. Half the reason they’d driven the eight hours along the California coast with O’Reilly’s oldest girl was for the chance to get a copy of Radar’s favorite comic signed by the Marvel legend. Part of the rest had been to give the Prof the opportunity to meet her hero in person at last, but Anna hadn’t lasted five minutes in the book signing line and had wandered off in search of her tribe, she’d said. Hawkeye had held out longer, but the milling and none too quiet crowd pushed too many of his buttons and he’d found he needed to stand somewhere with a wall at his back for a while.

Hawkeye made his way out of the dealer’s room and into the hall surrounded with enthusiastically odd people, half costumed, half dressed in the floral prints and bell bottom pants the kids were wearing these days, a smattering in more formal suits, most of those authors or producers or whatnot. It wasn’t unbearably crowded out here, though the sound of so many people at his back was still faintly unnerving.

He peeked in through the wide double doors leading to the conference room. It was packed as solid as the front rows of a rock concert. Forget comfort, Hawkeye wasn’t even sure he’d be able to squeeze through the crowd to find BJ at this point, even as tall as he was and with the bat ears sticking up—oh, never mind, there he was. Pretty far up and not worth the people surfing to get to him. There were a few overstuffed chairs in the lobby that hadn’t been claimed. He ought to give this Wolverine book at least a skim through, to see if it was appropriate, before giving it to Radar’s teenage daughter. Nineteen was still a teenager, after all.

He nearly disappeared into the squishy, yellowish-beige pleather chair and spent the next thirty seconds wishing he’d thought to order a drink first. So, let’s see about this Wolverine character, he thought. Nice looking man. Not BJ nice, but nice…

*

He was sitting in the overstuffed lobby chair, elbows on his knees, head cradled in his hands when he felt a light touch on his shoulder and a restrained sense of warmth. He sniffled. Anna crouched down on the floor in front of him and tilted her head to look through the angle of his tented elbows at his tear smeared face. “You okay, Uncle Hawkeye?”

“Hmm?” he said.

She pressed fingers to the back of his hand. His hand warmed and tingled at the touch. “Are you having trouble, Hawk? I think BJ will be back pretty soon.”

“I’m okay, Prof. Comic book made me cry.”

“Naughty comic book.” Small hands rested on his knees with a chin between. He wiped his face. Anna’s moon round face looked up at him innocently, framed by two long, wavy, light brown pigtails tied with red and blue yarn.

“I got it for you. I know you like the X-Men.” He handed her the book. “I dripped a little on one of the pages.”

“Oh, thank you! I have something for you, too.” She sat back crosslegged on the floor with that effortless flexibility he should have appreciated more when he was nineteen. Or thirty. “Fanzines! These two are extra racy, though I think you’ll have to correct the mechanics on a couple of the stories.”

“Now how would you know about something like that, Prof?” he said, effectively distracted.

“I’m not ten. And I, well, you know. I have my sources.” Her cheeks and ears reddened almost enough to match her Spiderman—Spidergirl costume. “You’re hungry,” she informed him, standing and sticking both hands out as though she could pull him to his feet. He’d end up pulling her into his lap if she tried. 

He put the comic book in her hands instead and wriggled himself out of the chair on his own, aging knees protesting just a little. “I am, Prof, but I don’t need you to check up on me. I’m fine, really. It’s just a good book. Brought back some things I hadn’t thought about in a while.”

She nodded suspiciously. “Let’s get some curry. It’s pretty good, for curry served in a paper boat with a plastic fork.”

“Sounds--appetizing?”

*

BJ caught up with them at their table near the curry stand. It had turned out to be decent curry after all, just spicy enough to warrant the Dr. Pepper they washed it down with. Hawkeye had just turned back to the Wolverine comic when large, black clad arms wrapped around him from behind and dropped a kiss onto the top of his head. He pushed backward into BJ’s chest for a fraction of a second before he remembered where they were and ducked away. “BJ!” He looked around at the apparently oblivious crowd. BJ, undeterred, slid into the chair next to him and laced their fingers together under the table. Even at fifty and change, he hadn’t needed any padding to simulate Batman’s impressive physique.

It took considerable self control to merely allow their bodies to brush together, side by side, as if by accident rather than crawl onto BJ’s lap. Considerable control.

BJ handed Anna the Spiderman comic. “I had him sign it to Radar O’Reilly. I hope that’s OK.”

“It’s perfect. He’ll love it.” She gave BJ a half-hug. “So, aside from standing in line for an hour, have you had fun?”

“It’s definitely been interesting,” BJ allowed. “How about you? Any luck?”

It was Anna’s turn to shrug. “One definite, one probable. And one guy I took down after he grabbed my ass one time too many. I warned him.”

“You’re not going to get in trouble are you, Prof?” BJ said, flipping into Dad Mode.

She waved a hand dismissively. “Nah, and it got me some extra cred with the Trekkies. Oh hey, is that--” she put her hand to her mouth, her eyes growing very wide. 

BJ pushed back his chair and stood, looking at a couple of guys in corduroy pants and argyle vests making their way toward their table. “I do believe it is,” he said, in a resonating voice that bordered on parody.

Hawkeye blinked for a beat before he caught his cue. “Golly Gee Willikers, Batman,” he managed to get out with an almost straight face before leaping into BJ’s outstretched arms, bridal style. He put his arms around BJ’s neck, pretending shock. “Is that who I think it is?”

“Mr. Lee,” BJ said as he set Hawkeye back on the floor. Hawkeye slid back into his chair, grinning. BJ showing off that he could still carry him always put a grin on his face that he couldn’t easily wipe off.

“Radar O’Reilly’s friends, I assume,” Stan Lee said. He turned to Anna. “Is it possible you’re Anna O’Reilly?”

She nodded. “It’s—wow. In person. Your letters meant so much to me, especially when I was little. I never felt like I was being humored. Even though I knew I probably was.”

“So, pre-med?”

“Sophomore year. I never did find Professor X. So I decided I’m going to have to be him.”

The older man nodded sagely. “Ambitious. And I love the costume. Did you make it?”

“Their wife helped me,” she told him.

Stan Lee’s double take settled into a smile remarkably quickly. “So, I’d love to hear about this ambitious plan of yours,” Lee said, stepping back to give her room to get up and follow him. She beamed, eyes still huge behind her coke bottle glasses, and walked away with him, their chatter fading into the murmur of voices echoing in the large convention hall.

BJ sat again. The man who had arrived with Stan Lee touched the cover of Hawkeye’s comic.

“What do you think?”

Hawkeye thought. “It’s pretty intense. Not what I was expecting from a comic book, you know?” He leaned into BJ. “I’ll finish it, but maybe not by myself. It brought back a lot of stuff I thought I’d thoroughly forgotten.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

Hawkeye shook his head. “No, no, sometimes I need to remember, you know? I got it for the daughter of a friend of mine, she’s staying with us while she goes to college out here and she is a little obsessed with X-Men.”

“I could sign it, if you want,” he offered, almost sheepishly.

“Sure. Write it to the Prof. Tell her--tell her she’s a marvel.”

The man, presumably Chris Claremont, grinned. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ve got another copy in my bag. I’ll sign this one to her, and another one for you.”

“Make that one mine. I got a couple of the pages wet.”

Claremont looked hard at him for a moment. “You’re a vet, aren’t you?”

“Both of us,” BJ said for him. “Combat surgeons. Korea.”

“I can hardly imagine,” he said, shaking his head. “Name? Or names?” he said, appraising them a little more closely. 

“I’m BJ. That’s Hawkeye.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

He scribbled on the inside of the front cover, then pulled out a pristine copy and confirmed, “To the Prof?”

Hawkeye nodded.

“Thanks for trying it out,” he said when he finished. “Well, I best get going. Good to meet you both.”

BJ pulled the comic back between the two of them. “So. Picture book made you cry.”

“Apparently they’re calling them graphic novels,” Hawkeye said, putting a little irony into his tone.

“You want to go back to the room and read it with me?”

Hawkeye shrugged. “Well, we are supposed to save the ah, Star Trek smut we picked up to share with Peg. And I could use a break from the crowd.”

Hawkeye tucked a book about surviving because you have to, even if you don’t want to into his bag full of fanzines and slung an arm around BJ’s shoulders. “If we pretend to be a little drunk we could walk all the way back to the room this way.”

“Won’t put me in the mood to read,” BJ said.

“We’ve got all afternoon,” Hawkeye argued.

In the end they started back toward the room pretending to be a little drunk, then Hawkeye got into the role and by the time they left the glass walled elevator they were pretending to be a lot more drunk than strictly necessary and it was a little while before they got around to cracking the graphic novel. They’d propped themselves up side by side in the bed in t-shirts and nothing else, and they wouldn’t have bothered with their t-shirts if it weren’t possible Anna would stop back in to change clothes or decompress—though she wouldn’t come in if they were actually busy.

He could see BJ nod and smile tightly in recognition when Logan lost control, and he knew by the hand rubbing up and down his back that BJ could tell when Logan put Hawkeye’s own loss and shame into words. It was funny, they’d read together with Peggy, usually in bed, and usually the raciest bits of the raciest novels Peggy could find, but he and BJ hadn’t really sat down to read something together, just to be part of a story.

There were ninjas, and he was pretty sure they had very little to do with the real thing. There were a lot of bodies, and the doctor part of his brain traced the path of inked blood on hand drawn clothes and faces and ran triage. That one might be alive, and that one. He wanted and didn’t want to keep going. He’d moved on in twenty years, from young men torn up by old men’s wars to all manner of humanity broken by violence and stupidity and his new worst enemy, motor vehicles—but every time he lost a battle, he felt like he was not enough. Not enough for the people who needed him at the hospital, not enough for Erin and Ben and Peg. Not enough, not worthy of the golden man wrapped around him. 

The thing about genius is that it always brought expectations that could never be met. Hawkeye had been precocious, and had worked his way up through school being called brilliant and gifted and the expectation had always been that he would be not merely excellent but phenomenal. He had been working his way toward phenomenal—or at least faking it pretty well, when Korea turned him inside out and stole his best years and he would never be the person he might have been. To be fair, he probably could never be that imaginary, amazing, perfect person. No one could. But that failure still poisoned all of his successes, made him feel like nothing he could ever be would be good enough. It wasn’t Logan’s self healing and adamantium skeleton, or even Anna’s more modest, but still in their own way terrifying gifts, but it was a responsibility that he hadn’t quite lived up to—not enough to forgive himself.

And yet, someone, more than one someone, a miracle cornucopia of someones loved him anyway. He rested his head on BJ’s chest and turned the page, putting himself inside another person whose pain recalled and reflected his own, but safe knowing the person he trusted most in the world would be there to lift him back up should he forget to breathe.


End file.
